


far less the land that he stops in

by aes3plex



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Selkies, everyone dies (except frmc) nobody lives (except jfj)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:21:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aes3plex/pseuds/aes3plex
Summary: someone on tumblr said “selkie!crozier” and rather than going “that sounds like a heartwarming slowburn au set in a small fishing village” i thought “that sounds useful”. in which james survives (?).
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 10
Kudos: 65





	far less the land that he stops in

James is drifting, absent, and then he is aware: raw flesh in his mouth, soft as butter, cold as ice. Salt. A warm hand at his throat, rubbing gentle circles: a language he does not know, perhaps one that does not exist, spoken over his head.

He swallows, somehow.

“James,” says Francis, somewhere beside him in the dark, his voice stiff, cracking, unmistakeable. James means to say something back but only breath leaves his mouth: warm in the cold air. Ache, ache, every inch of him ache: his head, his jaw, his bones. He feels he has been dead a year: a year and a day.

“Ah,” says Francis. One long exhalation. “You’re cold.” A pause, then, and something settling over James, a blanket, a fur perhaps: heavy, damp, impossibly warm. James moves his hand: has the strength to drag his fingers along its smooth sleek grain, just once. a fur, thick. He does not know the animal.

“Sleep now,” says Francis, somewhere beside him in—the tent? Or is it an ice house such as the people here build? He has no way of knowing. Already he is drifting again, rolled along by unknown currents.

He has the strangest impression, as Francis rises, that the man is wearing nothing but his own skin.

=

In the night—that one or another; they are all one now, barely stitched by the days—Francis curls at his side, against his back, his hot breath across James’s neck. Once James wakes to hear him singing, in a voice that sounds like stone and peat-smoke: something like an oar-song, steady and rolling as the surf. As he listens the pain goes from him, dripping down onto the ice like black oil and pooling there, like something to be set alight.

=

In the days nothing. Silence and the creak of the sea-ice.

=

By the time he is well enough to stand he has come to know the shape of the ice-room which is the house, the pattern of its construction, the strange assortment of objects which fill it: a sailcloth floor, the few books, the few tools. Its low ceiling, marked black by the smoke from the lamp.

Francis comes and goes: brings him water, in a small stone bowl; brings him fish, neatly cleaned and never cooked. He does not ask why and Francis does not tell him. He learns the taste for it, for the yielding texture between his teeth. (His teeth? He’d thought he’d lost his teeth. A dream in the fever, perhaps.)

No others come. No voice save Francis’s and that—ragged. As if with the whiskey again, though there can be no whiskey here. Ragged as if it came not from the throat but the teeth and the gut: ragged as if it belonged to the sea and the ice and the shale. He does not know why such thoughts take him.

They are dead, all of them. It is not a question he need ask. It had plunged through him like a wave when first he thought it and has now ebbed to tidal distance: there is no answering it, no making it less. Bridgens, Goodsir. George and Edward. Henry. All of them gone down into the dark. It becomes in time a sort of numbness, to be poked at with the tongue.

Once a strange fear passes that he is not himself alive and he sits upright on the low bench which is his bed (their bed): holds his fingers to his throat: takes his own warm pulse: inspects his own warm hands, the pale and flush of them, the wine-dark arteries and blue-china veins of his wrists.

Francis there in his slops, when James looks up, regarding him with something like pain. “You are well, James,” he says, as though there can be no question of it. As though it is necessary.

“I am,” James says. The twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth. It is the first thing he has said: still it comes easy.

They look at each other a moment: Then Francis folds like a sheet to the floor beside him, presses his face to James’s knee. His shoulders heave once in perfect silence, a great wracking heave which seems to tear something from him, and then nothing else: the warmth of him, the weight. James slips his fingertips into Francis’s hair: a trespass, perhaps. He thinks not an unwelcome one.

=

(They slip sideways into it, though perhaps the thought was always there. In the dark their hands catch, clasp, release.

Francis against him, all supplication: hand firm and steady at his hip: then withdrawn, leaving a cold space. Thigh against his thigh.

“James,” Francis says, “May I—” The strange lilt of his human voice, its stiff politeness, against the night.

“Will you light the lamp,” James says.)

=

“While I am gone,” Francis tells him as he dresses–white shirt grey, now, with wear–"you must not look outside.“ Like something from a folktale. When James looks at him he is serious, entirely serious: and longing, James thinks, too.

"All right,” James says, though he thinks Francis knows what he means.

=

He reads, during the day. His eyes he thinks are getting worse but perhaps it’s only the dark and the flicker of the lamp.

Among the half-mad things Francis has dragged here, keeps dragging here, watch-chains and coffee spoons, glass bottles and anthologies, he finds his own eight guinea boots, his full dress coat with his London tailor’s mark. Folded neatly as if waiting, though the epaulettes in their velvet box are gone.

“You’ve found it, then,” Francis says, when he slips in with the evening. There are more sensible things here that James might wear—blankets, pelts—but the house is warm enough inside, and he feels somehow more like himself with his own high collar against his throat, though he has no waistcoat and no stock.

“I kept it for you,” Francis says, as though it means something more than what it says.

=

“We will walk,” Francis says, picking pinbones from white-pink, white-yellow flesh, “when you are ready.”

Over the lamp, across the faded sailcloth floor, James sits: knees drawn up, watching. The flash of a short-bladed knife in Francis’s hand: not of Netsilik make, he thinks. Not English either. “I’m ready now,” he says.

Francis continues with his work. Holds out, after a moment, a square-cut piece of fish.

James takes it in his mouth. chews. swallows.

“Soon,” Francis says.

=

(“Francis,” James says, as often as he can: it seems necessary. Here in this place he can feel namelessness stalking always, devouring all it finds. He says it so he will not forget, in this place where they are only I and you.

Francis, pass me the book. Francis, the oil is low in the lamp. Francis, come lie beside me.

“James,” Francis says, rough as a rasp, as if he can say nothing else.)

=

Outside the plain stretches icy and indifferent in every direction. There is no feature, no reason for the placement of their shelter save a few yards ahead a small black hole in the ice.

It is a calm night and quiet. The full moon high over head. James waits. He wonders for a moment if he will see it, the creature, whatever it was: he does not think so. He does not think it can come here, somehow.

The wind, hushed, over the plain.

Then a sound, somewhere beneath his feet, and a sense of movement. Splash of water, invisible: and then a fat shining seal hauls itself from the sea and drops a black fish, still thrashing, at his feet.

He knows in the instant, before the shudder that goes through it and the reshaping of its outline, like a man struggling out of a coat: before Francis stands before him, naked, the soft grey sealskin round his shoulders like a cloak, his eyes as black and shining as the water edged by ice.

“I told you,” he says, “not to look.”

“I know,” James says, and kisses him, on his cold mouth which tastes of blood and the sea.


End file.
